Adobe brings two more desktop tools to Photoshop on iPad

Adobe has updated Photoshop for the iPad with two crucial new tools — the smudge and sponge tools, which have been mainstays on the desktop version of the app but absent on mobile until now.

The smudge tool (as the name suggests) is used to help blur and blend lines or colors together and comes with the usual settings for adjusting size and strength of the effect, along with a variety of modes (including normal, darken, lighten, hue, saturation, color, and luminosity). The sponge tool, on the other hand, works to help retouch images by saturating or desaturating color, allowing users to fine-tune how vibrant their images and art look.

Additionally, Adobe also rolled out a new update for Premiere Pro on desktop, adding key performance improvements for M1-powered Macs. With the new update, all M1 Macs now work with hardware-accelerated exports for DCI 4K and 8K HEVC formats, which Adobe says will result in “significantly faster performance.”

Additionally, Adobe is also offering hardware acceleration for ProRes videos on the M1 Max and M1 Pro chips in the latest MacBook Pro laptops, offering up to five times faster performance. Windows users with integrated Intel GPUs are also getting a boost, with improvements to video playback, too.